Stanley Francis Andrews

County Court: Jail for 71-year-old sexual predator

22 Dec, 2009 11:54 PM

A VICTIM of a serial sexual predator jailed yesterday for attacks on him and two other boys at Scarsdale in the early 1980s said he regretted not reporting the offences earlier.

The man, who is entitled to anonymity under Victorian law, was aged 13 when Stanley Francis Andrews, now 71, committed the first of a series of rapes against him at a remote bush property nearly 30 years ago.

However, it was not until 2007 that the man reported the crimes to police.

Andrews went on to assault two more boys in Western Australia in the early 1990s for which he served a jail term in that state.

”I’m kicking myself I didn’t do it any earlier because two other people in Western Australia could have avoided the same fate,” the man said outside the County Court in Melbourne yesterday, after Judge

Susan Cohen sentenced Andrews to six and a half years’ jail for the Scarsdale crimes.

In October, Andrews pleaded guilty in the County Court in Ballarat to 12 sexual offences committed against three boys between 1979 and 1987, including four charges of rape, four of gross indecency and four counts of indecent assault.

One of the victims was aged nine when the abuse began.

In sentencing yesterday, Judge Cohen said Andrews’ list of prior convictions for sexual offending against boys stretched back to 1955 and included three jail sentences.

She said his offending demonstrated a recurring pattern in which he preyed upon young boys after befriending their parents or grandparents.

”I regard this as despicable, crude and very serious level of offending of this type,” she said.

”You utilised your friendship with their parents to manipulate them to feel they would be at fault.

”You used them and made them feel degraded and humiliated. It was a manipulative act of power over the young and vulnerable.”

However, Judge Cohen said there were several mitigating factors she must take into account in determining the sentence, including the length of time that had elapsed since the crimes were committed.

She said Andrews’ litany of health complaints, including morbid obesity, a heart condition and diabetes, which would make his time in prison more onerous now than it would have been had he been sentenced in the 1980s, was another mitigating factor.

Judge Cohen said a doctor’s report testifying to Andrews erectile dysfunction, along with his apparently successful completion of a sexual offenders program in Western Australia upon his release from prison there, made his risk of reoffending relatively low.

He showed no emotion as Judge Cohen sentenced him, setting a minimum non-parole period of three years.